Recently in my worship group I gave a message about how in novel about stopping climate change the author imagines them creating a new religion which will save the earth but jokes it is really an old religion Paganism. It is about loving the earth.
To my surprise after that about 4 other messages were given (in our already quite small group) about people never believing in the "Old white bearded dude in the sky, but in Mother Earth", about talking to trees, or being able to center in nature and find spirit there. Later we did a worship sharing with the simple query How is nature spiritual for you? I noted for me that the bigness of nature; the ocean, the mountain, the forest, all have this majesty and eternal quality to them that brings me back to the Divine Mother. Others spoke about the beauty as the thing that brought them in harmony. The second query was how can we come more deeply into relationship with the earth? Many of us acknowledged that this one is harder to answer. So much has been done by existing paradigms to seperate us from the earth. We have so many blind spots. But it seems important. In fact critical at this moment on earth.
The person who created the queries notes that she had looked in Faith and Practice and also at Quaker Earth Care Witness queries. But she had not been able to find ones she liked. She had not been able to find them because the ones she found still had a sort of how can we care for or have stewardship over the earth. She sensed that it is still a separateness paradigm or worse yet a human over earth view point. She could not find queries that acknowledged the inherent spiritualness of the earth or asked us to be "in relationship" with the earth as Native spirituality so clearly does, or as the science of eco systems does.
What would it mean to be a Quaker Pagan? To come back into relationship with the earth - to sit under the silence of a tree and hear its message?
